ANAND wrote:Most of these players with newly-granted access to the pro-chest still don't contribute to the team in any way at all, and end up wasting all weapons to the enemy by jumping into battle without any strategy whatsoever.
No one ever seems to have any strategy on this server (at least not that I've seen), players always just go out randomly and do their own thing. There's a team chat but it never really gets used for planning a strategy. Seeing as the matter has been brought up to be honest I think that is the root of the problems on this server.
What is
actually needed, but which is never going to be implemented and which I don't really expect to be implemented, is a player matching system. Players with similar scores (i.e. a measure of skill) should be matched together in a match (multiple matches run in parallel). Then you don't have one good player getting frustrated in a team full of noobs, or noobs screwing up a team of good players, and so on.
ANAND wrote:Ideally, a K/D-independent criteria would make things much more balanced. If you come up with some good ideas in this direction, please do let us know.
Well apart from the existing sort-of suggestion of "give everyone a decent weapon" (which, although making the game more fair, does remove the incentive to collect and store good weapons which is a major part of the game, so I don't consider it a good solution overall, it just showcases the issue) I can only really think of solutions involving score.
To me, the score requirement stops noobs from taking the good stuff from the chest. I see the K/D requirement as a way of restricting players that make no effort to kill other players or to stay alive and are therefore wasting weapons, which is why I suggested lowering it to just below 1 (the intention is to make it equal to 1, which is statistically the average K/D of a good player in a match of good players, while allowing some room for fluctuation). 1.5 simply does not make sense if the intention is to separate good players from bad players, or to separate players who waste weapons from players who use them productively. So other than lowering the K/D to something just below 1, I don't have any other suggestions for criteria based on the player's score/ranking, although I don't understand why lowering the K/D in this way is being rejected as a suggestion (and why everyone claims that a K/D substantially greater than 1 is reasonable and not indicative of an imbalance). The score requirement could obviously be raised to compensate if this is actually an issue.
The only other solution would be to avoid score/ranking entirely, and to have a system based on "give back what you take out". You could require players to return, on average, the same number of items that they take out (not on a per-match basis, but long-term, so similar to a K/D ratio but a ratio of items taken to items given and if this drops below a certain value or the number of items taken is greater than the number of items given by a certain difference then block access to the chest). The problem with this method though is that players might be able to "cheat" this by taking out good items and putting in worthless items, so there would need to be some way to weight the value of each item. Honestly if everyone's going to insist that a K/D requirement around 1 does not make sense and that 1.5 is apparently reasonable even though it makes no sense then this is the only other sustainable long-term solution that I can think of.
EDIT: I know my tone is harsh regarding the K/D stupidity but I fail to understand how anyone can reasonably expect every good player on the server to simultaneously hold a K/D greater than 1.5.